Events and Seminars

Event	:	Joyce’s Lalangue: On Masochism, Anti-Blackness, and Écriture Féminine
Venue	:	Online
Date	:	22/05/2025
Duration	:	6 - 7:30pm BST
Extra Info	:	A paper delivered by Dylan Lackey as part of the Freudian Research Seminar Series. This seminar, which responds to the significance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) for post-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, will unfold across several stages: In the first stage, the prelinguistic homophony that Jacques Lacan called lalangue (using Joyce as exemplar) will be compared to and contextualized alongside Freud’s extrapolation of the significance of the Mother’s voice for introducing every subject to coherent speech and meaning. In the second stage, Frances Restuccia’s Kristevan-Deleuzean response to Freud in Joyce and the Law of the Father (1990) will be considered closely. In Restuccia’s text, the critic identifies Joyce as a masochist who expels his Fathers (both allegorical and biological) from the symbolic order on behalf of the Mother, embedding himself in the Écriture féminine (feminine writing) of written lalangue by manipulating the unique and maternal possibility of the moterial letter (‘moterial’ referring to Lacan’s term for the ‘materiality’ of the ‘word’ [mot]). Here, the letter as material substrate is directly related to what Freud says of the Mother’s voice and to the way that this voice flows across the body of the child and lends phonemic structure to meaningless babble. In the third stage, Restuccia’s reading of the artist’s use of lalangue as a form of masochism will be extended and critiqued through a close reading of Part I, Section VII of Joyce’s Wake. In this section of Joyce’s infamous book, Joyce’s textual alter ego—the character Shem the Penman—is revealed via a series of racist remarks to be racially Black or African. In reply to the imposition of his Blackness through the violent tropes and slurs that his brother, Shaun, hurls at him herein, Shem defecates into his own hand, using excrement to write a miniscule reconstruction of the Wake across his skin in an act that decidedly exonerates him, per Joyce, of the ‘black animal,’ or of a certain excessive Blackness. Using reference to recent developments in Black radical critique, this final stage questions how Shem’s Black ‘exoneration’ alters Restuccia’s interpretation of Joycean masochism, asking if creative access to the maternal or feminine realm of lalangue cannot not take place but through a caricaturing of Blackness that ultimately absolves the artist of an association with ungendered Black non-being (per Hortense Spillers), or with what DS Marriott, after the anti-colonial analyst Frantz Fanon, calls ‘Blackness n’est pas’ [is not]. In the end, movement through these stages should condition not the abandonment of the radical possibilities of feminine writing, but a deep critical reconsideration of those possibilities if feminine writing can indeed be sighted in historical entanglement with an anti-Black violation.
Organised By	:	Freud Museum London
Web Link	:	https://www.freud.org.uk/event/freudian-research-seminar-joyces-lalangue-on-masochism-anti-blackness-and-ecriture-feminine/